But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to say to that?
A child! Yes, she has something to say even to that. ‘This beats all!’ are the words.
‘Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you that this time—’
‘Of course not,’ she says soothingly, ‘oh no, she canna be me’; but anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, ‘I doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand—it is so long since I was a bairn.’
We came very close to each other in those talks. ‘It is a queer thing,’ she would say softly, ‘that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I wonder how it has come about?’
There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but that time had long passed. ‘I suppose, mother, it was because you were most at home in your own town, and there was never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a country-side where you never carried your father’s dinner in a flagon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or winding up the clock.’
‘And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of! Do you mind that, and how we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of me?’
‘I remember.’
‘And now you’ve gone back to my father’s time. It’s more than sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flagon through the long parks of Kinnordy.’
‘I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the stile at the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl coming toward me with a flagon in her hand.’